Secular Chaos and the Production of Hot Jupiters. I want to have a new national holiday called “Secular Chaos.” Or maybe just the best band name ever? The groupies could be the “Hot Jupiters”? Anyway, this is up high on the list of my favorite titles for scientific papers.
I was reading a nice article in Nature (“Hot Jupiters from secular planet–planet interactions”) and this reference completely caught my eye. I recommend 1) the arxiv paper, 2) the nature paper, 3) the holiday, 4) the band! 🙂
“Secular chaos is known to be responsible for the eventual destabilization of Mercury in our own Solar System.” I propose the holiday occurs at perihelion of Mercury. That way we celebrate every ~88 days, and we all have to learn a bit more about general relativity (google precision of mercury’s perihelion).
Precession is a word, autocorrect!